Atribuido al Dr. Alaoui

·Mientras intentamos ponernos en contacto con el doctor Mahmood Alaoui publicamos este breve texto que hemos encontrado en un chatboard.

They found him at dawn, on the second bench past the old ceiba tree in Parque del Encuentro, kneeling on the gravel path like a penitent saint. Hands clasped. Head bowed. His body polished and stuffed, eyes stitched open in serene devotion, as if caught in prayer, or surrender.

The police cordoned off the area, but the photos were already everywhere before I boarded the flight from Casablanca. The man’s name was Caetano Aguilar, a mid-level bureaucrat for the Comisión Nacional del Agua, though none of the papers mentioned his recent efforts to halt illegal drilling near the old missions of Chiapas. But I did.

I’ve spent the last twenty years tracing the aftershocks of the black goo, that ancient, animate oil which once warped empires and hollowed out the souls of men. I’ve mapped its trail across conquests and corporations, through the jungles and cities across the Americas, and now resurges again in Chiapas.

And yet, Caetano's death, ritualistic, posed, and grotesquely reverent, wasn’t new.

In 1938, a Franciscan friar named Sebastián del Rayo was found in almost the exact same spot, in almost the exact same pose. His skin had been flayed and lacquered to preserve his flesh, his hands clasped, his mouth stitched into a smile. The local records chalked it up to jungle madness or pagan rebellion. But I found a note in the margins of a confiscated Jesuit diary, “El Hermano Rayo vio el Ojo Negro antes de morir. Decía que oraciones habían obtenido respuesta, pero no de Dios.”

Two murders. A century apart. Same valley. Same devotion. Same black stain spreading through time.

I went to the park myself two nights ago. No cameras. No journalists. Just the restless wind, and something deeper underfoot. A vibration. A murmur. It felt as if the earth beneath that park was breathing. Or worse, listening.

This was not the work of an ordinary killer. This was a performance. A message. One that only someone like me was meant to understand.

Caetano’s autopsy revealed no blood in his body. None. Instead, they found a tar-like residue coating his organs, identical in consistency to the samples pulled from the Sidonita vault in 1830. The goo is awakening. Or being fed.

I believe one of the original men who opened the vault in Mexico City, the so-called Misionarios, survived. I believe he never died. Or rather, something inside him never did.

He’s still working. Still converting.

I fear Caetano is not the first in this new chapter.

And he will not be the last.